You ought to have seen Westy stare.
“I don’t smoke and you don’t smoke and none of us fellows smoke. Well then, how did these ends of cigarettes get here? Somebody was in this car last night. Don’t you suppose I noticed that before I asked him about how the fire started? Believe me, I’m not taking Charlie Slausen’s word for much. But I’ll tell you this, he isn’t as bad as people think he is. What do you suppose Chief O’Day cares who he sends to jail as long as his name gets into the newspapers? ‘Clever catch by Bridgeboro’s chief’ that’s all he’s thinking about. He isn’t smart enough to catch cold, even.”
“Well, what are we going to do?” Westy asked me.
“Now you’re talking,” I said. “First we’re going to go over and help the rest of the fellows. When we get through and they have all gone home, we’re coming back here. Then we’re going to start. We don’t want any one to know about this but ourselves.”
By about five o’clock all the members of the troop had gone home and Westy and I went back over to the car.
I said, “As long as we know there was some one here last night the next thing to do is to see if we can find any footprints.”
In the ground, just at the foot of the step, we found a couple printed there just as plain as day.
“This is a cinch,” Westy said.
“Easier than keeping our mouths shut,” I told him.
Now those footprints went in a straight line over to where the shop had stood and there we lost them on account of the stuff that was all strewn around there. But under where the window had been we found a lot of footprints. I guess some of them were our own. But there weren’t any except right there, and I suppose that was on account of the sidewalk on Willow Place being so near.